With all three bartenders back together and John Yoo in the host chair, the gang wonders why it is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr is so far making the most sense in the 2024 presidential race, how it is that Kevin McCarthy has (stop the presses!) actually impressed Lucretia, and why the obviously political attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas expose the left at their power-grasping worst. But then we get back to school, with John expressing his usual faux-puzzlement about the New York Times 's genuine ...
May 06, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 420
Heather Mac Donald may be the most fearless journalist in America. She is relentless in her reporting, bracing in her truth-telling, and ferocious in arguing her case. Her new book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives , explores how the current attack on meritocracy in the name of "equity" is rampaging through almost all American institutions, in particular arts and culture, but also higher education and corporate America....
May 03, 2023•43 min•Ep. 419
Who is the only federal judge to have played basketball in the Olympics for Cuba? Who is the only federal judge known for driving around town in a 1960s-era convertable Rolls Royce? Who is the only federal judge who was nearly deported? The answer is an n of 1 , as statisticians would say: Judge Carlos T. Bea of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who the Los Angeles Daily Journal was correct to call "the most interesting judge on the 9th Circuit." Born in San Sebastian, Spain in 1934, his family le...
Apr 29, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 418
This week we took the 3WHH on the road for a special ad-free episode, as Lucretia and Steve recorded before a live audience at Commenter-Con II in Phoenix. Commenter-Con II is the inspiration of 'Ammo Grrrll" (known in real life as Susan Vass), with Power Line readers from 27 states turning up. It also coincides roughly with the 40th anniversary of Lucretia and Steve's very first argument, which, Steve now admits, Lucretia was right about after all. After we kick around the stunning news about T...
Apr 25, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 417
In what may be the most wide-ranging episode of the 3WHH yet, the troika ranges from the implications of the Fox News settlement with Dominion for the defective NY Times v. Sullivan doctrine, to an extended discussion of the natural law arguments on abortion—the topic aborted last week for lack of time—and lastly to a look at notable political movies with the unlikely offering from Lucretia that an underrated moral-political movie worthy of note is . . . The Devil in Miss Jones??!! Needless to s...
Apr 22, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 414
This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Groff vs. Dejoy , involving a Post Office mail carrier named Gerald Groff, who, for religious reasons, wished not to work on Sundays. Previously the postal service had granted this accommodation, which was easy back when the Post Office didn’t do mail delivery on Sundays. But a few years ago the Post Office started contracting with Amazon and other package delvery services to do Sunday deliveries, though they still granted Groff his...
Apr 20, 2023•47 min•Ep. 415
Lucretia hosts the bar this week, as Steve and John extol the virtues of Japanese whisky while trolling the left for its latest futile attempt to take down Justice Clarence Thomas. Lucretia celebrates a brew pub in Arizona that stood up to the braying mob that resents real beer drinkers who like the Federalist Society, which deserves to go with a lighter highland malt. And in our "This Week in Democrats" segment, which pairs well with a dusty, peaty whisky, we wonder why the left is suddenly try...
Apr 15, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 414
You know how people who think they can top something crazy like to say, "Hold my beer"? Well, this week Budweiser decided to try to top Alvin Bragg's bogus indictment of Donald Trump by rebranding their "light" beer such that no one want to hold it even for Alvin Bragg. What explains this dumbest marketing move since the New Coke? And does the Biden Administration have a political death wish by deciding to use Title IX as a trans-cudgel? ("Trans-cudgel" is one of the 159 genders isn't it?) Yes, ...
Apr 08, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 413
Lot going on this week, including Steve successfully completing his mandatory online "Abusive Conduct Training," otherwise known as Lucretia's How-To Guide to Blunt Speaking. Did you know abusive conduct ias bad ? How would we have known without an online training module? The good news for Lucretia is that "making unpopular statements about controversial issues" is not considered abusive. The bad news is that "making egregious statements about a person's lifestyle" is considered abusive, so we h...
Apr 01, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 412
We’re a day late getting to the whisky bar this week on account of complicated travel schedules. Lucretia sits in the host chair as Steve was still feeling light-headed from too much high-altitude skiing while John is his usual jaunty self, baiting Lucretia with his thoughts in the Boston Globe about how Alvin Bragg and the other chipmunks of the left are blowing it with their attempt to bring... Source...
Mar 26, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 411
John and Steve are off galavanting in Florida, up to all kinds of mischief and boozy dinners, so this episode was recorded sans whisky but after a lot of fine wines. So this episode really could have been called “the three Bordeaux happy hour,” plus steak. We picked up where we left off last week, with some follow up thoughts on the defects of the criminal justice system especially when it comes... Source...
Mar 18, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 410
Willmoore Kendall Willmoore Kendall was one of the great political scientists of the postwar era, and has been back on our minds lately for a number of reasons. As a heterodox champion of Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, a critic of the place of John Locke in American political thought, and a defender of majoritarian deliberation, his provocative ideas are making a comeback in the age of nationalist... Source
Mar 15, 2023•49 min•Ep. 409
The unifying theme to this week’s episode (recorded before a live Zoom audience) is that Republicans had a pretty good week, except for Sen. Mitch McConnell, who preceded falling down a stairway (Lucretia swears she didn’t push him, but we’re waiting for the video footage!) by falling for the liberal line that releasing the January 6 video footage is somehow a threat to the republic—almost as big... Source...
Mar 11, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 408
John Marini was one of the first conservative thinkers in 2016 to recognize that Donald Trump posed an existential threat to the administrative state, in a series of articles that are included in a recent collection we highly recommend, Unmasking the Administrative State: The Crisis of American Politics in the Twenty-First Century. In this second half of our conversation (take in the first part... Source...
Mar 08, 2023•55 min•Ep. 407
Our ninth and final seminar of our series on The Federalist concludes our discussion of judicial review, with a detour to the famous case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803 that supposedly settled the matter, though Lucretia draws some fine and original distinctions between what John Marshall did in Marbury and what the Supreme Court did afterwards. From there we consider Hamilton’s argument in... Source...
Mar 06, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 406
You mean I can get these in triplicate now!?! This week the Three Whisky Happy Hour tackles not only the “major questions” doctrine at the Supreme Court, but the major question about McDonald’s new (but unadvertised) triple-cheeseburger, whether the Democrats’ decision to hold their first primary of 2024 in South Carolina is a major or minor question, who is the All-Time Worst/ Source...
Mar 04, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 405
The “administrative state” is an obscure and ungainly phrase, but in recent years the term has burst out into general use, though it is often conflated with another term currently popular—the “deep state.” They are not the same thing, though they do overlap, and “deep state” does enjoy the advantage of being shorter and pithier. What is “the administrative state”? It is a mistake to confuse it... Source...
Mar 01, 2023•46 min•Ep. 404
The spectacle of Georgia’s grand jury forepermix is enough to induce a grand mal seizure, but we move on quickly from that spectacle to the specter of the Supreme Court pondering the Heisenberg Uncertainty Point of the Constitution: is the vice president, as first in line of succession, part of the executive branch, or, as president of the Senate, part of the legislative branch? The answer is Yes. Source...
Feb 25, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 403
Settle down class, time for our next lesson. This week we take up how The Federalist explains Article III, the judiciary, and especially the nowadays familiar power of judicial review, which is nowhere specified in the text of the Constitution, and was in fact an issue of controversy and confusion at the time of the founding. So we start our investigation with Federalist #78... Source...
Feb 19, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 402
John showing off his gourmet dinner. Getting together at the bar was a bit tricky this week since we’re all scattered to the wind and John Yoo thought it essential that he swing through a McDonald’s takeout window for the double-cheeseburger special with large fries, so he was late joining us. We were halfway through learning about the newest acronym in higher education—AANAPISI—when he finally... Source...
Feb 18, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 401
Can it really be possible that this is the 400th episode of this ramshackle podcast? With such a milestone, it seemed a good occasion to get the Fantastic Four who work the site every day together at once (never simple to do), and we decided to do a dry run with a special Zoom webinar for our VIP subscribers. Savor this rare occasion, as Steve, Scott Johnson, Joe Malchow and John Hinderaker... Source
Feb 17, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 400
Session 7 of our PLU short course on The Federalist met on Saturday this week, and took up Hamilton’s defense of the presidency from the anti-Federalist critics starting with Federalist 70, the paper where he discusses the famous phrase “energy in the executive.” Included in the usual inventory of Hamiltonian paeans to the executive is a look at his often overlooked views on the proper... Source...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 399
Lucretia hosts this week’s episode, though this does not let Steve and John off the hook for their Stockholm Syndrome symptoms in any way. The run-up to America’s most holy secular observance—the Super Bowl—found Steve having his own Bill & Ted-style excellent adventure with Gov. Ron DeSantis, Lucretia pondering Sy Hersh’s latest purported scoop on who blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline... Source...
Feb 11, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 398
John Yoo assumes the host chair for this week’s episode, and despite declaring this week to be a Ukraine-Free Zone, Lucretia still manages to get in a sequel to some of last week’s discussion threads. But the main event for the first third of this episode is reviewing the dreadful events in Memphis last week, though John has to go a stretch to reach the Dylanesque heights of “Memphis Blues Again”... Source...
Feb 04, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 397
This week’s Power Line University seminar on The Federalist completes our discussion of the separation of powers in Federalists 47 – 51, and then takes an extended detour into the Progressive Era attack on the separation of powers and other basic principles embedded in The Federalist—and by extension, in the Constitution. There are few things more fun than beating up Woodrow Wilson... Source...
Feb 02, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 396
Many of The Federalist Papers bear the title, “The Same Subject Continued,” and with a lot of news about the Ukrainian situation coming out this week, we decided to continue last week’s vigorous argument over Ukraine with some of the new facts, such as how much of our own munitions inventory is being drawn down to supply Ukraine (see chart below), the decision to send Abrams tanks... Source
Jan 28, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 395
We continue our leisurely stroll through The Federalist with an extended look at Federalist numbers 47 through 51, which explain the key concept of the separation of powers—a phrase that is nowhere found in the text of the Constitution, but which is clearly implied by the design and structure of the text. But Madison and Hamilton leave nothing to chance, citing “the celebrated Montesquieu” as a... Source...
Jan 27, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 394
This classic format episode features a conversation with Dan Lowenstein, professor emeritus at UCLA Law School and, more importantly, the impresario of UCLA’s Center for the Liberal Arts and Free Institutions ( CLAFI), which he founded, along with one of our favorites at Power Line, Jean Yarbrough of Bowdoin College. Prof. Yarbrough was in town for three days to deliver a fabulous lecture... Source...
Jan 25, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 393
This week’s raucous episode, recorded well after conventional happy hour ends, ranged from Biden’s dementia to the failed Dobbs leak investigation, to Kevin McCarthy’s (relatively) good week, the post hockey ergo propter hockey fallacy, bidding good riddance to one of the premier COVID cultists, a defense of cat-calling (even when it’s done to our Lucretia), and then . . . a big fat argument about... Source...
Jan 21, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 392
This week’s class resumes our leisurely stroll through The Federalist starting with Federalists #33 and #37, and the “partly federal, partly national” character of the Union under the proposed Constitution—a subject that remains as confusing and contentious today as it was then. Lucretia walks us through how the issue began to settle out starting with the landmark 1819 case of McCulloch v. Source...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 391
